Social Networking: A purposeful loss of privacy

Social networking has become the new way to communicate between friends, colleagues, and coworkers. Some companies even use social networks to market themselves to the countless numbers of users within the networking platform. There are over a billion active users that go on Facebook whom all have profile pictures, tagged pictures, status updates, and interests. Now, uploading all of these things would not be a problem if you know how to change your privacy settings; however, if you do not, these information will be open to the world to see for who knows how long. Also, there are loopholes to information being leaked on social media and privacy being breached. Is there a way to prevent this loss of privacy? Or will this just be something we need to get used to as the new media generation?